Quilt

Happy Jawbone Family Band

Quilt

It's not uncommon to form a band while in college, and that is exactly what Quilt did. Its founding members, Shane Butler and Anna Fox Rochinski were visual art students at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, but bonded over their mutual love of weird, experimental jams and classic pop harmonies. John Andrews joined the band as drummer after opening for every Quilt show on tour in 2009. Butler grew up in a "community with a lot of musical chanting" and Rochinski was "doing classical singing in choirs that had a lot of crazy harmonies. There's a lot of repetitive, almost mantra stuff in our songs," she adds. Quilt is a band with strong roots that formed at the apex of the point in your life when you're thinking about your own art and what it all means.

From the gorgeous two and three-part harmonies that pepper every track to the twinkling guitar that floats over everything, this is wandering music made up of expansive, cinematic moments, brought home by those harmonies. Singing at the same time, Butler and Rochinski are the core, sounding both powerful and intimate while letting their voices go thin and then build up to a concrete thickness. At points, when all three members sing, it's a revalation. "Penobska Oakwalk" sounds already classic, Rochinski rounding out Butler's melancholy with subtle power, while "Gome Home" is all bluster, thudding bass, footstomps and faint, swirling desolation. "Philosophically and musically we're very attuned in a lot of ways," Butler says. It's visual music without any visuals. Quilt's music is so vivid that we don't even need them.

But the real key to the band lies in the members' complete freedom with their music. Each of these songs is a result of endless jamming letting the tracks take shape organically until they cohered into songs worth digging into. "We get together and intuitively flow and then carve the songs with lyrics," Butler says of the writing process. But that's not to say Quilt are comfortable making an appealing melody and a catchy riff and leaving it at that. Instead, the band finds a formula in experimentation, letting keys drift languidly, following their own threads wherever they need to go.

Happy Jawbone Family Band

Five friends span a very long distance – Brattleboro to Boulder – and yet make music like they're all part of the same body of whimsy and mirth, of childlike wonderment and adolescent inappropriateness, of love in the eccentricities of life inside the mind. The Happy Jawbone Family Band is the cure for a pop approach that's conflated width and depth with the infernal need to ham it up with literary aspirations, fey mannerisms, prep-school smarm, and a compulsion to restage The Lion King. Music has gone to hell by people who don't do the right drugs for the right reasons, and this band of transcontinental misfits is out to rewrite the false, bloated history of what "indie rock" became when it traded hands to the masses and to Madison Ave. Tastes The Broom collects nine tracks that fit together from the group's 100-strong catalogue of songs, previously released across a smattering of cassette tapes, LPs and singles from the past five years. There are nine more where that came from, and even more after those (and surely after – the group is recording their fourth full-length with Jarvis Taverniere of Woods for release on Mexican Summer later this year), and Tastes The Broom should acclimate everyone who hasn't been paying attention. The HJFB skips and hops through the DIY era from the late '70s onward, making music that could fit in any time between then and now. You would be wise to pick up what they're putting down. RIYL: Robyn Hitchcock, Neutral Milk Hotel, Vic Godard, Akron/Family, The Cherry Blossoms, Paul Williams, The Hospitals.